Licensing Policy for Content Providers to EOL

To the greatest extent possible, the Encyclopedia of Life promotes anopen‐source, open‐access approach. Therefore, it requires that content providers (including the EOL’s core participants) serving information through the EOL agree to the following provisions:

All information currently in the public domain will remain in the public domain. Neither the EOL nor the content providers will seek to assert any IPR over any public domain materials that are made available through the EOL.

Content providers are required to adopt a Creative Commons license for the information that they serve through the EOL. Except for public‐domain content, the default and preferred license is CC‐BY (Attribution), which allows users to copy, transmit and reuse the information, and to remix or adapt the information, as long as attribution regarding the source of the information is maintained. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ for a more detailed explanation of the CC‐BY license.

Content providers who request some restrictions on re‐use of their information may select an alternate Creative Commons license:

The EOL will provide attribution information for all content that it serves. EOL will also indicate the Creative Commons license attached to each object (text, structured data, graphics, multimedia, etc.).